Waybills, Part 128: more weight stamps

I  have written before about weight agreements, but not recently, so here is a summary. Railroad cargoes were mostly billed by weight (there was also a carload category, covering, for example, a full hopper of coal). But the considerable majority of weight-billed loads were not weighed on a scale. Instead, weight agreements were in force. 

For example, a shipper of floor wax might know that a case of wax bottles weighed 48 pounds. Then the number of cases in a load could simply be counted and multiplied by 48 to get total weight. This was all certified by a regional Weighing and Inspection Bureau or WIB.

North America was divided up into regions, under the authority of Freight Associations or groups of associations. The map below shows the associations, some of which supervised a single WIB, but in other areas, several associations might cooperate to supervise one WIB. I have previously discussed the WIB territories (see the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/waybillls-part-85-more-on-weight.html ).

Superimposed on the map below in green is a single WIB, the Western WIB, the territory of which matched that of the Western Trunk Line Committee (freight association). The map is a 1925 version, taken from page 28 of a book of that date (Grover G. Huebner, The Fundamentals of Traffic, Traffic Service Corp, Chicago, 1925). In addition to several complete states, included in the green area are the eastern third of Colorado, the upper third of Illinois, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

When a shipment weight was certified as part of a weight agreement, the shipper could stamp the waybill with the appropriate WIB stamp, including their agreement number, or oftentimes would simply type the WIB initials and agreement number of their waybill. This avoided a trip to the scale.

Just the other day, my friend Bill Jolitz sent me a WIB stamp he found on eBay, stating that he “knew with whom it belonged.” Thank you, Bill! The stamp is shown below, a typical design for these large stamps, about 3 inches tall.You can see it was made in Chicago.

As is common on rubber stamps, the legend of the stamp is placed on the top of the stamp; in this case, the stamp has a round opening in the center, convenient for the handle.  

Below I show the stamp image, about 1.5 inches square, flipped in Photoshop so you can read it (naturally the stamp is made in reverse, so it will stamp reading correctly). This stamp is unusual in that it does not have an agreement number in the center; I assume it could be written in, and an authorized person then initial it. 

Using a fresh ink pad, here is the image as it stamps now (showing some wear, which is great for our purposes). Note the generous center space for an agreement number.

If one used large enough waybill forms for one’s layout, this stamp could be used on them as-is. But my waybills are quite a lot smaller. I take a scan of the stamp image, remove the background so it is transparent, and set it to a size that will look all right on my small waybills, usually 3/4 inch diameter. (This takes a couple of minutes in Photoshop.) Then it’s easily added to waybills. Here’s an example, pending initialing the stamp and adding other scribbles.

This was a kind gesture of Bill’s, to send me this stamp, and I will be using it on future waybills.

Tony Thompson 

Kit appreciation: Speedwitch 50-foot NP box car

 I have written a number of kit appreciation posts for freight car kits that I have especially enjoyed. This one is about a Speedwitch Media kit for a Northern Pacific 50-foot single-sheathed automobile car, kit K103. 

The prototype is a group of 1000 cars purchased by NP in 1926, the first 500 from Pressed Steel Car Co. (cars 5000–5499) and 500 more from Standard Steel Car Co. (cars 5500–5999). They had a ten-foot, six-inch door opening, 5-5-5 Murphy corrugated steel ends, and a traditional NP radial roof. Below is a builder photo (Haskell & Barker, Smithsonian Institution neg. 5073, Richard Hendrickson collection). The fishbelly underframe is evident.

The NP monad on the door was only applied to cars from Standard Steel Car. Note NP’s typical lettering of the 1920s, with reporting marks, number and capacity data to the right of the door. In the 1930s, NP would revise its lettering to conform to ARA standard locations. By the late 1940s, the monad was no longer applied to these cars, and the word “automobile” was omitted as well. 

By January of 1953, my modeling year, there were 935 of these cars still in service. Here is a 1954 photo taken on the Embarcadero at San Francisco (Wilbur C. Whittaker).

An interesting detail of these cars, barely visible in the builder view above, was the application of the Miner “Ideal” lever-type handbrake. It is shown more clearly in a photo of the model (taken from kit directions). Here you can also see the lumber door, applied only to this end.

In building the car, I chose to apply AB brakes, as would be appropriate for my modeling year. These were retrofitted to these cars in the early and mid-1940s. Here’s a view of the completed and painted underframe. The train line was omitted. 

Here’s a photo of the completed model, showing the car lettering and number matching the Whittaker photo above. 

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 The roof is nicely rendered as shown here, along with the corrugated ends. 

This model is a nice re-creation of a distinctive freight car. It often runs in my layout operating sessions, both in mainline trains and for local switching on my branch line. I enjoy seeing it at work.

Tony Thompson 

A note on the shipping of tanks

In a recent blog post, back on February 12, I showed my assembled HO scale Roco kit for a U.S. Army M47 tank (new in mid-1953, the year I model). I then showed the model being shipped on a flat car. (You can see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-new-armor-load.html .) Below I reproduce the flat car photo. 

 There ensued half a dozen comments to the post (you can see them at the bottom of that post), three of which pointed out that tanks like the M47 were shipped with main guns facing to the rear. You will also see my reply, in which I admitted I had not checked loading diagrams.

It nagged me that I had shown this load without checking a loading diagram book; after all, I have one. It’s shown below, and is clearly aimed at DoD shipments. Note the effective date of the book, AAR Pamphlet No. MD-7: it is October 1, 1953, clearly just right for my modeling era. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

There are two applicable loading diagrams in this book for tanks like the loads I have modeled. One of them, Fig. 90 on page 247, for lower-weight tanks, is shown below; it is rather obviously the profile of a Sherman tank. 

The accompanying description for this diagram states explicitly that guns are to face forward, and that if no gun brace is available on the vehicle, that one should be made with a piece of 2 x 6-inch lumber, secured to the gun with steel banding. And there are period photos of Shermans shipped just this way.

Note also the diagonal tie-downs in the diagram. I have omitted these on my removable armor loads so that the loads are not too fragile in handling, though of course they would be there in the prototype. 

 But the issue we are addressing is not Sherman tanks, but the newer M47. In this same loading pamphlet, there is a separate category for heavier tanks. In that case, diagram 92 on page 253 applies, and it’s shown below. This is very clearly the profile of an M47, with its distinctive long turret gun and rear turret overhang. 

And not only is the gun shown facing forward, but the text in the pamphlet reads thus: “Turret gun should be in straightforward position, and turret lock handwheel and elevating mechanism handwheel, must be wired to prevent rotation.”

I do not dispute that in later years, many different tanks, not just the M47, were shipped with guns facing rearward. I merely point out that such was not the case for the M47 in 1953. 

Tony Thompson  

 

A look back: David Weitzman’s steam book

Today I want to say a few words about a wonderful book I’ve admired and treasured for many years, Superpower, by David Weitzman (David R. Godine, Boston, 1977). It’s descriptively sub-titled, “The Making of a Steam Locomotive,” and that is very much what the book contains.

The dust jacket features an illustration that wraps all the way around the book, of the first “superpower” steam locomotive, Lima’s 2 -8-4 for the Boston and Albany, always called “A-1” at Lima. It’s an 11 x 13-inch book, horizontal format, hardbound, containing just 108 pages.  The jacket foretells the illustration style of the book: just the subject of each image, no background, nothing more. 

The story line is that of a young apprentice, just starting out at the Lima Locomotive Works, who is shown the various components for building the A-1. He even meets Will Woodard, the designer of the superpower concept. I will just show a few examples of the 35 drawings, which can only suggest the power of them in the book, as they often run across the gutter of this large-format book.

An early example is the cylinder castings, shown being examined before assembling the pair of them into the cylinder saddle. The right-hand cylinder is on the facing page, its edge just visible here.

Another interesting example is the foundry work for casting the frame halves. The partial image I show below is the sand casting mold, being prepared in the lower area for the molten steel to be poured into the mold, and the upper half of the mold above it. This is most but not all of this large drawing.

Other locomotive parts were forged from steel. The work making one of the main rods is shown, with a typical modest-size forging hammer. Again, this is most but not all of this drawing.

The last drawing I will show is the assembly of the boiler onto the frame and cylinder saddle, when the locomotive parts first begin to all come together. 

What a book! I have been through it  many times, and thoroughly enjoyed it every time. Of course, I’m a steam-era guy and all that, but the illustrations are so well done, and the processes so well shown, that I think anyone with an engineering bent of any kind would like it,

Tony Thompson  

String charts aren’t new

 What’s a string chart? It’s a way of representing schedules, for trains in our case. The idea is pretty well known in model railroading. It is simply a graph of time vs. distance. The distance is the geography of a train’s run and the time span is that of its schedule for that run.

This is very clearly explained, indeed spelled out in detail, in Bruce Chubb’s excellent book, How to Operate Your Model Railroad (Kalmbach, 1977). The example below is for a notional railroad, running from Easton to Weston, and the train is No. 24. The slanting line connects (from bottom) the departure time at Easton with the times of the stops at Frog’s Hollow and Elbow Bend, to the arrival at Weston.

Thus the slope of the line is the average speed. The times in such a chart can come from, or be the basis for, a working timetable. When a complete schedule of trains is represented in this way, the advantage of a string chart is that it visually shows all trains in relation to each other, while showing location and duration of intermediate stops. 

I recently encountered an example of string chart that shows the idea is not new. Here’s the background. The Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland, passing under the very steep St. Gotthard Pass of the Alps to reach Italy, was completed in 1882. It is 15 km (9.3 miles) long, at the time of its construction the longest tunnel in the world (today an even deeper St. Gotthard Base Tunnel is 57 km long.)

In 1982, as part of the centenary of the 1882 tunnel, a commemorative calendar was issued, including photos of the original construction and train photos of various eras. What I found interesting, though was a reproduction of the original schedule through the tunnel, expressed as, you guessed it, a string chart. 

Note at the bottom of the image above that the cover and interior pages of a travelers’ guide, in French and German. It can be seen in the pages at right that there were a lot of trains. For contrast, the 1982 schedule was reproduced also, as you see below. Still lots of trains.

I would just mention in closing that most model railroads with any complexity of train operation can benefit in planning as well as execution if string charts are constructed. My point today is that the idea is far from new, and certainly didn’t originate with model railroaders. 

Tony Thompson 

The new Lines West WP box cars

I just recently learned of some new 3D-printed box cars from Lines West (Richland, WI) in HO scale. You can visit their website for information on all current products, at: https://lineswestproducts.com/ . The new kits I was interested in are for some 1916-built Western Pacific box cars and their descendants. Below I will quote from some of R.J. Dial’s very nice prototype research summary, provided for the kit. 

The prototype cars were built by Pullman in 1916, 1000 40-foot cars numbered 15001–16000. As you see below (Pullman Library), they were 40-ton single-sheathed cars with K brakes, wood doors, and arch-bar trucks. They also had a lumber door in the B end.

In the 1920s, WP converted 200 of these cars to stock cars, and in 1931, added 32 more. In 1936, conversion resumed, with another 200 cars converted and modernized. Thus more than 400 of the 1000 original cars became stock cars by the mid-1930s.

In 1937, WP converted 100 of the cars for bulk gypsum service with roof hatches, renumbering them into the 26001–26100 series. The cars had collapsible internal bulkheads to contain the cargo. In 1942, 25 more were converted. 

Below is a photo (Norman Holmes) of one of the cars in plaster service. Note the large door emblem and the roof hatches near each end, along with  late-style Andrews trucks.

Additionally, in 1936, WP began to convert surviving cars of this series into MOW cars, as their limited capacity made them less suitable for freight service. Many survived in their MOW assignment until the end of the WP. 

The next year, 1938, WP began converting some of these cars into cabooses, the first 38 with cupolas, then 61 more with bay windows instead of cupolas. By 1940, with the arch-bar trucks about to be banned, surviving box cars were stored, out of service, on line.

Lastly, after World War II, there were 35 of the original box cars in existence, and all were converted in 1947 to company stores service. With those conversion completed, none of the original 1000 cars remained as box cars in revenue service. Lines West has done kits for all but the cabooses.

I purchased the kit for the box cars that WP converted to plaster service, since by my 1953 modeling year, all the revenue-service box cars of this group had been scrapped or converted to other use.

When the kit arrives, it has no instructions in the box, but a very nice and complete set of instructions, along with a good prototype history, is available on the Lines West side as a PDF you can download (at: https://lineswestproducts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Kit-Instructions-WP-Pullman-Boxcar-Stockcar_V6.pdf ). There is also a pretty good YouTube video covering boxcar assembly; it can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9TNVrBRFJE .

The parts are extremely nice. The photo below shows the car body (note the several internal bulkheads, avoiding a problem which can occur with 3D-printed models: warpage. At lower left is the very nice underframe, with all brake gear and piping installed (the modeler will need to add brake rodding). The floor is slightly warped, as you can see, but is flexible and when snapped into place in the body, not only fits perfectly but also straightens.

At right middle are the car doors, below them the scale couple boxes (suitable for Kadee #158 couplers) and at bottom center, the roof hatches. All parts are quite nice; for example, the Z-bar braces on the car body are in fact Z braces. A nice touch is the inclusion of threaded brass inserts for bolster and coupler box screws, since many printed resins don’t seem to like being threaded.  

My first step, as it often is, was to place the car weights. As I usually do, I used two steel 5/8-11 nuts. But as you can see above, the interior bulkheads mean that the weights can’t be simply glued flat on the inside of the floor. Instead, they have to glued in an “upright” position between the bulkheads, where they just fit.

Next I began working on the body by starting to place the many grab irons that need to be installed. Starter holes are in the body at all such locations, making this work much more convenient. But I’ll continue with this project in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Route cards, Part 31: Grading box cars

I have posted previously about this topic, grading the condition of box car interiors so they are suitable for particular commodities. I was recently given a copy by Michael Litant of a Union Pacific employee document for this work, which forms the subject of today’s post. My previous posts contained quite a few examples of the cards attached to cars to indicate their grade, usually to route card boards, thus the series topic above. I list five of these below. 

https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/07/route-cards-part-19-grading-freight-cars.html

https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/08/route-cards-part-20-more-grading-cards.html 

https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/09/route-cards-part-23-varieties-of.html 

https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/09/route-cards-part-25-still-more-grading.html

https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/10/route-cards-part-27-back-to-grading.html 

Below at left is the cover of this screw-post UP book, 4.5 x 7 inches in size. At right is the first page, describing the contents. I will be posting the entire contents on Google Docs, but will show a few pages here to indicate the scope. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

Then pages 4 and 5 give a verbal description of the inspection process, referring to the UP grading card, Form 4151-1, which I will show blow. 

Both sides of the card itself, probably reproduced full size at 3.25 x 5 inches in dimensions, are shown  below, pages 6 and 7.   

Lastly for now, I show here a bit more of the instructions including grading specifics (page 9), referring to car interior photos on following pages. The photos are washed out and pretty uninformative, so not presented here.  

The instructions essentially state that the card should be attached to the car with the uppermost side being the type of grade.  Below is an example used card (Litant collection), slightly different in format and listing different commodities than the ones shown above, dated July 12, 1968 and stamped by the inspector, A. Lish, at Pocatello. 

I continue to find car grading an interesting topic, even though it is rarely applied in model railroading. Good to see all kinds of prototype practices, even if we don’t use this particular one. 

Tony Thompson 

A new armor load

Almost ten years back, I upgraded an HO scale Roco “Army” flat car, improving details, repairing the deck, replacing the undersize trucks, and repainting and re-lettering. Here’s a link to the concluding post in that series: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/12/upgrading-roco-flat-car-part-3.html . 

I then wrote a lengthy series of posts about a wide variety of military loads, mostly armored vehicles, that could move on that flat car, posts starting with the term “Roco flat car,” though loads weren’t restricted to that flat car. If you want to search for those posts, use “Roco flat cars” as the search term in the search box at right. Here's the concluding post in that series: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/10/roco-flat-car-part-10-still-more-loads.html .

On thing missing from my series was a more modern tank. I had used the various World War II vehicles from Roco, appropriate since older vehicles very much remained in use stateside for training during and after the Korean War. But I thought a more modern tank, such as served in Korea, would be good too. 

An excellent reference, discussing in detail the evolution of tank design from World War II’s M26, through the M46, to the M47, is contained in Jim Mesko’s book, M48 Patton in Action (Squadron/Signal Publications, Carrollton, TX 1984). That historical material, of course, is presented as background for the M48 tank.

There aren’t too many good photos of the M47 in the U.S. (many were transferred to U.S. allies). Here is a view of one in German service during winter maneuvers in Germany (U.S. Army photo). The hull, suspension, and turret show the extensive differences from the Sherman family of tanks.  

Though these have been available in HO scale as ready-to-run models, none seemed available when I wanted one. Instead, I located a Roco kit (their number 5086) for an M47 Patton tank.

The kit is quite simple, a body in two halves, the treads and suspension for each side, and a turret with main gun and commander’s hatch. There are no kit directions, but the location of all parts is pretty obvious. It also comes with a machine gun for the turret top, but these weren’t installed during shipping. I glued the parts together with styrene cement.

Then to make the tank into a load, I needed to add tread chocks from the Heiser set of resin parts, which I’ve shown in a previous post (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/07/more-about-vehicles-on-flat-cars.html ). That post also shows the boards applied along the side of the tracks.

Most photos I have been able to find of these tanks in the U.S. show minimal lettering, most visibly the absence of the distinctive white star on the turret sides. So I left mine unlettered. The as-built model above is pretty shiny, and was next given a coat of flat finish.  

Finally, I experimented with the new load. The M47 weighed about 48 tons, so could be accommodated on 50-ton or 70-ton flat cars. It’s shown below carried on a 70-ton flat car, ATSF 93459, representing a General Steel Castings one-piece body (Walthers kit), on the SP main line, passing the caboose track at the engine terminal in my layout town of Shumala. 

Like a number of armor loads I have assembled before, I enjoyed both the modeling and the chance to learn more about armored vehicles. Previous posts have listed many of the prototype publications in which this history can be found, in addition to the Mesko book listed above. Military loads like the M47 continue to be seen in mainline trains during my layout operating sessions.

Tony Thompson 

My latest operating session

Last weekend, the Bay Area enjoyed a visit from Bob Hanmer, well-known layout owner and operator from Chicago. He joined  the monthly operating session at Paul Weiss’s Central Vermont layout on Saturday, and on Sunday he operated on my layout, along with Seth Neumann, Jason Schoenmann, and Jim Radkey. This was session no. 108 on my present layout.

In some ways, this was an entirely ordinary session, in other ways much less so. For one thing, the long-running “trackwork wars” on the segment of my track between the towns of Ballard and Santa Rosalia (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/12/trackwork-wars-part-17.html ) was again tested, and though certainly not problem-free, largely performed well with locomotives at slow speeds. 

The problem was confined to the area between the switches to Jupiter, and to Track 7 in Ballard. More there yet to do, but a considerable improvement over certain past sessions. Here is that area, right above the valley between the two roofs of the MOW sheds. Rail right there seems to have freed itself from the ties, allowing locomotive wheels to shift it out of gauge. This will be fixed. 

Another aspect of the session was the renewal of something Bob Hanmer and I have been doing back and forth.  I had discovered that a source of printing paper from my online printing plant could be a mill on Bob’s layout (see the description at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/10/another-visit-to-bob-hanmers-layout.html ) For this session, a new waybill in this story was included, which of course Bob discovered, as was intended. The routing even obeys Car Service Rules.

The crews started out with Jim Radkey (left) and Seth Neumann at Ballard, with Seth conducting. What Seth is reaching for in the photo, I don’t know.

Meanwhile, Bob Hanmer and Jason Schoenmann were working at Shumala, In the photo below, Bob (left) is discussing a couple of moves with Jason; Bob was the conductor. After these shifts were completed, the two crews switched sides and assignments.

The session as a whole went well, with crews finishing in less than the average time span. More importantly, it seemed that a good time was had by everyone. That’s what all this is for, after all.

Tony Thompson 

An excellent new book

A really excellent railroad-experience book has just been published. Entitled Life Along the Tracks, it’s published by Basalt Books (an imprint of Washington State University Press). The dust jacket is shown below. The career stories are those of the Mike McLaughlin (1937–2012), assembled and brought to press by Jim Providenza. Jim also coordinated the outstanding map efforts of Dave Clemens. 

The cover photo, one of many in the book from the talented camera work of Phil Hastings, is revealing: it’s not the Overnight Express roaring down the track, or even the dispatcher, king of all he surveys. It’s ordinary railroaders, probably doing track inspection. Very much in tune with this book. 

It’s an 8.5 x 11-inch hardbound book, 242 pages long. with both a glossary and index. It’s nicely produced. I was a little disappointed that the publisher chose to use uncoated instead of coated paper, but it doesn’t greatly matter here, as the photos are really illustrations, not reference material. And about the photos: considerable effort, mostly of Jim Providenza, located and selected the many fine photos in the book, since Mike’s own photos disappeared.

Some of us in model railroading have experienced what it takes to manage a large yard. I enjoyed Mike’s comment (page 157) about how it was, back in the day: “Yard offices were a madhouse, with clerks trying to decipher train lists and yard checks made in the rain, yardmasters screaming for the train list to make up their switch lists, crew callers, janitors, and a lonely cry from the corner: “Where IS that damn car . . .’ ”  

The content is especially interesting to me because although it’s a rich variety of railroader recollections, it's not the Operating Department. Mike worked on track and signals, and late in his career even in traffic management, spread over seven railroads, including Great Northern, Denver & Rio Grande Western, and Rock Island. But to me, all of it is good reading.

I have to say a little about the superb maps by Dave Clemens. Many railroading situations involve kinda complicated geography, most of it not particularly evident to the general public. Dave has created map after map which brilliantly show exactly what the reader of the book needs to know, and little more. I will illustrate with his two maps of the railroad lines around Bellingham, Washington. First, the local tracks:

Here we see the GN passing through the area, the NP just reaching it, and the Milwaukee having a ferry slip to serve their “island branch” trackage. How does this connect to what’s a little farther out of town? Dave has shown us that too:

All in all, really a well-done, well-illustrated, fun book to read. I’m sure many modelers will have the same reaction, even if they might not get excited by the book before looking inside. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Tony Thompson 

Modeling a PFE fleet

I have posted several times about this topic, and over the years have given a number of talks about it, but continue to get questions and comments on the subject. As the principal author of the 464-page PFE book (Thompson, Church and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000), I do have resources to try and answer questions like this. And of course the book remains your primary source of information.

Although I personally model 1953, I realize that many people model other parts of the PFE era, so in the material below, will try to cover a range of years. But almost any choice of era will lead to interesting photos, like the one below (Extra 4015 East, Green River, Wyo., Sept. 3, 1955: John E Shaw photo). Which cars are these? Or to rephrase: what mix of cars should I have? And perhaps strikingly, what mix of clean and variously dirty cars should I have?

Following PFE’s dramatic inception in 1906, when E.H. Harriman ordered 6600 new refrigerator cars to create the first PFE car fleet, cars continued to be of wood-sheathed construction, including wood board roofs, until 1920. 

In that year, outside metal roofs became standard for new and rebuilt car construction, but car bodies remained wood-framed and wood-sheathed. The first all-steel cars were built in 1936. But because of the immense number of wood cars in existence in 1936, the steel cars remained a relatively small fraction of the fleet until the middle 1950s. 

As additional classes of steel cars were built, the fleet slowly began to be dominated by cars of that type, though as late as 1960, wood-sheathed cars (by now all rebuilds) remained 60 percent of the fleet. The first mechanical reefers owned by PFE were built in 1953, but even by 1962, they ware only 9 percent of the fleet. But this rose quickly as ice cars were scrapped, and by 1970 mechanical cars were 64 percent of the fleet. All these relative fleet characteristics are well documented in the PFE book.

For a single example of the kind of information in that book, below is a chart made by Dick Harley and contributed to the book (pages 440 and 441). It shows graphically and clearly the evolution of the PFE wood-car fleet over time, including rebuilding. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.) 

 For modelers of any part of North America, the size of PFE’s fleet is worth pointing out. For quite a few years, it hovered just under 40,000 cars, bigger than most railroads’ entire fleet, as you see below. This graph also shows how many cars were washed every year, and you can see it’s a significant fraction of the fleet each year, except in the depth of the Depression and during World War II, until washing was discontinued in the early 1950s. 

 I show this graph because it has a consequence for car appearance. You can’t weather PFE cars before the 1950s just on the age of the paint scheme, because of this washing. For more about washing and all that, see my earlier post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/appearance-of-pfe-reefers-part-3.html . 

I have had modelers ask me about PFE underframes. After the first car classes with a heavy and complex underframe, PFE changed to the single-beam Bettendorf design, which they continued to use into the middle 1920s. They then changed to what they called a “built-up” underframe, which was assembled from plate and angles. 

Both are shown below (you can click to enlarge if you wish). The section at right is labeled as a “40-ton” underframe, but thousands of 30-ton cars received this kind of design also, just with a little lighter section. All cars with either underframe were wood-sheathed cars. 

I guess my point is that there are considerable resources to answer questions about the prototype and, by implication, many modeling issues too. But I am always available, via this blog or privately, to try and answer questions.

Tony Thompson

Handout for “The Role of the Agent”

This is the on-line handout for a clinic entitled “The Role of the Agent.” The purpose is to provide documentation of the various published items shown in the talk, along with links to a number of blog posts which cover some points in the talk in much more detail. They are grouped below by topic area. 

My point in the clinic was to indicate that many of us enjoy trying to operate model railroads in a prototypical manner, as in the photo below (Seth Neumann at left, and Steve Van Meter, switching at Ballard on my layout). I attempted to indicate how we can go about such imitation of the prototype, choosing the specific railroad that I model, the Southern Pacific.

Print Publications

Armstrong, John H., The Railroad – What It Is, What It Does (Chapter 8, Railroad Operations), Simmons-Boardman Publishing, Omaha, 1982. [there are several subsequent editions with updates; the original is closest in time to the era I model] 

Benezra, Steve, and Phil Monat, editors, A Compendium of Model Railroad Operations, Operations Special Interest Group, Downington, PA, 2017.

Coughlin, E.W., Freight Car Distribution and Handling in the United States, Car Service Division, Association of American Railroads, Washington, 1956.

Grant, H. Roger, The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2022. 

Koester, Tony, “In search of the perfect waybill,” Model Railroader, February 2012, p. 82.

Thompson, Anthony, “Prototypical waybills for car card operation,” Railroad Model Craftsman, December 2009, pp. 71–77.  

Thompson, Tony, “Getting Real: A More Prototypical Waybill for Model Railroads,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, pp. 31–46, May 2012. 

Thompson, Tony, ”Getting Real: Operating with Prototypical Waybills,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, January 2018.  

Thompson, Tony, “Modeling Traffic on a Layout,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, September 2021.  

SP Circular 39-1, “Instructions to Station Agents”

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 2,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/sps-instruction-to-station-agents-part-2.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 3,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 4,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part_10.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 5,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part_25.html

Learning from Circular 39-1

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 88: Temporary Waybills,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/08/waybills-part-88-temporary-waybills.html

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 90: SP Form 704,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/09/waybills-part-90-sp-form-704.html

Bill Boxes

Thompson, Tony, “Bill Box,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/bill-box.html 

Thompson, Tony, “Modeling Bill Boxes,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/05/model-bill-boxes.html 

Salamon, Dave, N-Scale Magazine, issue for September-October 2017. 

Other Points

Thompson, Tony, “Southern Pacific’s Circular 4,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/12/southern-pacifics-circular-4.html  

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 39: SP Typography,”  https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/04/waybills-part-39-sp-typography.html

With the help of these and many other publications out there, we can hope to capture the spirit of moments like the one below, with the C&NW agent (right) at Brookings, South Dakota, exchanging a roll of waybills with the conductor on the caboose in a light snow (H.R. Grant collection, 1940).  

Tony Thompson